The present invention relates to a control apparatus and method for a master-slave robot to generate and teach an operation of, for example, a robot arm, a master-slave robot having a control apparatus for a master-slave robot, a control program for a control apparatus for a master-slave robot, and an integrated electronic circuit.
In recent years, on a manufacturing premise, due to manufacturing of a wide variety of products in small quantities, model changes are frequently performed. On a recent manufacturing premise on which cell production is popularly performed, in order to automate a screwing task or a fitting task for components, a fixing task therefor, an inserting task for a flexible board, a polishing task, and the like with robots, the robots need to flexibly cope with a wide variety of components or procedures. A task such as an inserting task for a flexible board that handles a flexible material is complex, and still mainly manually performed. It is strongly demanded to automatically perform the task that is mainly manually performed.
Thus, a method of teaching a robot to perform a task with use of a teaching pendant or a programming is used. However, when teaching is performed by such a method, the number of teaching steps disadvantageously considerably increases. In order to solve the problem, direct teaching that teaches a robot by directly touching the robot or a method of performing simple teaching by using a control apparatus for a master-slave robot in which a robot (master) that is manipulated by a person and a robot (slave) that actually works are different from each other is used.
An example of the direct teaching is known in which a force sensor is attached to a wrist of a robot or the like, and a teacher directly grips a handle attached to a top of the force sensor to lead the robot to a teaching point and teaches the robot a point to be positioned at (see Patent Literature 1 [Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. 59-157715]).
As an example of a method of performing simple teaching by using a control apparatus for a master-slave robot, a method of performing teaching by using a control apparatus for a master-slave robot in which a force acquired by a slave manipulator is fed back to a master manipulator, and the force added to the slave manipulator by a person can be sensed is used (see Patent Literature 2 [Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. 2002-59380], Patent Literature 3 [Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. 8-281573], and Patent Literature 4 [Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. 1-34686]).
As an example of the method of performing teaching by using the control apparatus for a master-slave robot, a person grips and operates a master manipulator to teach information to the master manipulator. On the basis of the information taught to the master manipulator, a method of teaching the information to a slave manipulator having a size different from that of the master manipulator by increasing or reducing a distance between teaching points is used (see Patent Literature 5 [Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. 5-204440]).